


Siren Call

by ThanksForListening



Series: Hair Ties and Lullabies [2]
Category: Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
Genre: (talking about trauma not being traumatized), Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, basically i can't write fluff without turning it into a therapy session, its trauma time baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-23 09:50:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23009602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThanksForListening/pseuds/ThanksForListening
Summary: "It always happened in the quiet moments. The early hours of the morning, when the leftover energy from a mission hadn’t quite disappeared yet. The sleepless nights, when memories clawed their way into her mind and wouldn’t let go until her screams released them. The lazy afternoons, when the radio played softly and melodies she’d almost forgotten danced around her lips. It was only when the world went still that Dinah felt her watching.She didn’t remember the first time she noticed it. The staring. Maybe it was because Helena was always watching everything and everyone around them that Dinah didn’t realize how frequently that attention fell on her. How it felt different. Helena looked at the world with suspicion and anger and indifference, but not her. She looked at her with something much softer, something she hadn’t found a name for just yet. No word in her arsenal was deep enough or strong enough to describe it.Whatever it was, she could feel it now."
Relationships: Helena Bertinelli & Dinah Lance, Helena Bertinelli/Dinah Lance
Series: Hair Ties and Lullabies [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1644340
Comments: 16
Kudos: 257





	Siren Call

**Author's Note:**

> ahhh so im not 100% happy with this one but im posting it anyway bc if i wait till its perfect ill never post it so here u go. you don't have to read my other BOP fic at all to understand this one but like in my head everything is connected and in my head this one is earlier than that one, so do with that what you will lol. 
> 
> also i don't think i need trigger warnings but let me know if i do i will gladly add them!

It always happened in the quiet moments. The early hours of the morning, when the leftover energy from a mission hadn’t quite disappeared yet. The sleepless nights, when memories clawed their way into her mind and wouldn’t let go until her screams released them. The lazy afternoons, when the radio played softly and melodies she’d almost forgotten danced around her lips. It was only when the world went still that Dinah felt her watching. 

She didn’t remember the first time she noticed it. The staring. Maybe it was because Helena was always watching everything and everyone around them that Dinah didn’t realize how frequently that attention fell on her. How it felt different. Helena looked at the world with suspicion and anger and indifference, but not her. She looked at her with something much softer, something she hadn’t found a name for just yet. No word in her arsenal was deep enough or strong enough to describe it.

Whatever it was, she could feel it now. 

The question she longed to ask sat on her tongue but she forced it to wait. She just wanted a minute, because they were both sitting here, and the silence between them was comfortable and easy and precious. They were all still getting used to this living together thing, but right now, sitting with Helena, both of them done with breakfast but not ready to move on with the day yet, felt like the most familiar thing in the world. It was early enough that the sun had both risen and was still rising, it’s light shining through their window at an angle that, when Helena sat in the kitchen chair in front of her, made her look almost angelic. Dinah gave herself a second to appreciate the view.

“What do you see,” she finally asked, “when you look at me?” 

Helena’s eyes widened, and Dinah couldn’t help but laugh. “I—I don’t—I don’t look at you,” she said, her eyes now uncharacteristically cast towards her lap. Dinah followed her gaze, saw her hands fidget with the hair tie around her wrist. It hadn’t taken her very long to discover that the Helena who showed up during a fight was a completely different person than the Helena who showed up anywhere else. Fight Helena never got nervous, never second-guessed herself. She was all confidence and muscle and focused rage, nothing like the woman in front of her, quiet and awkward and hesitant, avoiding eye contact and twisting a hair tie in her lap over and over again. She didn’t know how she could have two completely different people inside herself, how she found a balance between that. If she found a balance. 

“You look at everyone,” Dinah answered, “but not in the same way.”

“What do you mean?” She didn’t know if it was a genuine question or a way to deflect, but she answered it anyway. 

“You know,” she said, “like Harley. Every time you watch her, you always get confused. Your eyebrows scrunch up right here,” Dinah pointed to the spot on her own forehead, and watched Helena mirror her, “and your eyes get a little squinty.”

“They do?”

Dinah nodded. “And Renee, you always look a little scared of her. Which is crazy, because you could totally beat her in a fight. Don’t tell her I said that,” she added quickly, glancing at the room where Renee was sure to be in bed for at least another two hours, “but you totally could. And yet when you’re with her, there’s always at least one moment where you get so...skittish. It’s like the elephant afraid of the mouse.”

Helena smiled, just barely, and Dinah felt a warmth that the sun couldn’t provide. “I don’t think you’re giving her enough credit,” she said softly. “She could beat me.”

“Oh, she’d make you work for it,” Dinah said, “but when it comes down to it, my money’s on you, Crossbow.” Helena’s smile grew, and she didn’t know if it was because of the sentiment or the nickname. She wished she did, if only so she could keep saying whatever made her look at her like that. “You know,” Dinah continued, “modesty is not something I would have pegged you as having after our first meeting.”

“What, you’re saying saving everyone’s asses didn’t make me seem modest?” 

“Excuse you, that was a _team_ effort.” She joked, and Helena kept smiling, which made her smile, which left them sitting there, smiling at one another underneath the sunlight. “You know what, I take it back,” she said, pretending to look away. “You’re as arrogant as the rest of us.”

“Oh no, I’m heartbroken.” She deadpanned, and Dinah lost it. She didn’t really get it, but somehow everything was funnier when Helena said it. Maybe it was because she didn’t joke around that often. It was as if she didn’t know how to, or didn’t trust herself to be funny, but that only made it more special to Dinah when she did. 

They sat in that feeling for a while, the warmth of getting along. Dinah wanted to keep talking, but there was something about the silence she didn’t want to interrupt yet. So she watched, and she tried to memorize this moment, draw it out and stick it in her pocket so she could look back on it later and remember what it felt like to truly relax.

“Can I tell you something?” Helena said, and even though they were technically in the middle of a conversation, it still caught her by surprise. Helena wasn’t the one to break the silence. She seemed so comfortable in it. She could spend hours without ever making a sound. Dinah didn’t understand it. She knew she wasn’t Harley, who couldn’t stand any moment passing by without making noise, but Dinah still liked to have something to fill the space around her. It was what she was used to. The quiet unnerved her in a way that Helena seemed immune to.

She realized Helena was waiting for a response. She did that a lot. Stuff like rhetorical questions and sarcasm and pop culture references often went right over her head. Harley and Renee liked to poke fun about it, but Dinah secretly found it endearing. It added to her genuity. Made her really easy to trust, despite her inclination for silence. 

Dinah nodded, and Helena kept talking. “You’re why I stayed to fight. That first day.”

“Really?” 

“It was when you took the gun from Cass, when you fought for her. That’s what made me stay.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t tell,” she said, “with Harley. What her intentions were with the kid. But you — you wanted to keep her safe. I knew it. So if you were in, and you trusted the others enough to fight with you, then I figured I could trust them, too.”

Helena finished her sentence and looked up, almost as if looking for approval. Dinah smiled at her, and she watched as her shoulders relaxed just slightly. 

“Oh, I’m definitely telling Harley that,” she said, and Helena looked almost confused, so she added, “I’ve gotta rub it in her face. She still thinks it was her rousing speech that brought us all together.”

Helena laughed, an occurrence as rare as her starting a conversation. Dinah secretly thought it was partly her fault. She’d come to realize that Helena might have looked at each of them differently, but when she was watching the group all together, it was like she was studying them. Like she was learning how she was supposed to act with them. After their first team-up, when Harley and Cass stole her car, Helena had straight up cackled, but she’d stopped when she saw her and Renee. Something in the way they looked at her made her stop. In the couple months since then, she’d never laughed like that again. 

“Hey,” Helena said, “you never told me how I look at Cass,” and Dinah tried to control her face, she really did, but Helena noticed everything. It was almost annoying, how hard it was to hide around her. She didn’t always get what it meant, but she always saw the emotional stuff. Shifts in mood, tone changes, body language, none of it went unnoticed. She was blind to sarcasm but saw sadness before you even felt it. Dinah watched her process the shift she felt happen, watched her body tense back up again. “Sorry,” She said, even though Dinah knew she didn’t know why she was apologizing, “I—um, I shouldn’t have—“

“No,” she stopped her, “don’t. It’s not you. I just—“ she sighed. “With Cass, I noticed you...you always look a little sad. And I don’t know why.”

Helena gave her a look she couldn’t quite pin down. She almost looked scared, although of what she wasn’t sure. “I don’t want Cass to think she makes me sad,” she said after a minute, her voice so quiet Dinah could barely hear her from across the table. 

“It’s not that obvious,” she said. “It’s just...it’s like you’re seeing two things at once. Like you see her happy, and you look happy, but there’s something in your eyes that sees something else, and that’s what’s sad.”

Ten seconds of agony passed as they sat there, the words lingering between them, before the silence made her too restless. 

“What do I know, though, right?” Dinah said, with a smile that was only mostly forced. “Forget about it. I’m probably just making shit up, or—“

“I think you’re right.” Her voice was soft but the words were loud somehow. Dinah waited. She hoped the silence would do for Helena the opposite of what it did for her. Minutes passed, one right after the other swallowed up by the quiet. Helena didn’t talk like this very often, but when she did, she spoke as if every word mattered, as if each sentence was a puzzle and she had to wait to find the right pieces before she could put it all together. 

Eventually, she found them. “Sometimes, when I see Cass, and I see the life she has, I think...I think that we’re too late.”

“What do you mean?” 

“I think we saved her too late.” She looked up, and Dinah felt like she was staring right through her. “I think about the shit she’s seen already. I think about how we’re all she has, and I think that we’re not enough. I think that she probably wakes up screaming like you do, and I think about whether she’ll always wake up screaming or whether she’ll learn how to stop it, and I think that’s a terrible lesson for a kid to learn, and it makes me so angry but I won’t let her see me angry because I refuse make her life worse. And then I think that makes me really fucking sad.”

Dinah had never heard so many words come out of her mouth at once, each one more heartbreaking than the last. Helena just sat there, eyes wide and breath a little shaky. She could see her hands balled up in fists, could feel the pain rolling off her like waves onto a shore. She could feel the anger in the aftermath, tension in the air so thick she wondered how there was still any oxygen left to breathe, pain so heavy she wondered how Helena walked around every day without shattering under the sheer weight of it all.

Dinah couldn’t stand it. 

“Don’t freak out,” she told her as she stood up, “but I’m going to hug you now, because I don’t know the right thing to say and because I think you need it.”

Dinah walked around the table slowly, part of her waiting for a protest that never came. Helena just sat there, staring straight ahead as if it was the only thing keeping her together. It wasn’t until Dinah placed a hand on her shoulder that she acknowledged she’d left her seat. Dinah reached out her hands, waited for Helena to take them, waited until she’d pulled her up out of her chair, before putting her arms around her. 

Helena just stood there. Dinah had her head against her chest, could feel her heart racing and her body trembling, just slightly. She realized she’d never hugged her before, and she tried to think of the last time someone hugged Helena. Had Harley or Renee? Cass? Any of the men who raised her? Or had she not felt the comfort of familiar arms around her since before she lost her family? The thought made her squeeze tighter. 

She let go after a minute. Helena’s arms never moved from their position at her side, but Dinah didn’t mind. She looked up at her, and she thought she saw tears in her eyes, but it must have been a trick of the light, because she’d never once seen Helena cry. 

“I know talking isn’t really your thing,” Dinah said, “but you know if you ever want to, you can talk to me.”

She turned, walked back to her seat, but stopped when she realized Helena hadn’t moved, was still staring at the place Dinah had stood, as if she saw something that wasn’t there. 

“You alright, H?” She asked hesitantly. 

“I don’t know.” The words came out as a whisper. She looked over, and she wished she had Helena’s skill, because her face was a mosaic of emotions and Dinah couldn’t make out a single one. “Harley says I need therapy.”

Dinah chuckled. “We probably all need therapy. Harley included.”

“Yeah,” She said, but there was something in the way she spoke that made Dinah hesitate. 

“Do you…” She started, not sure if she was crossing a line in asking but also not sure she could just leave the conversation alone. “Is that...something you want to do?”

Helena didn’t say anything for so long Dinah wondered whether she was still here or whether she’d drifted off into her own head, whether she wanted Dinah to come find her and bring her back down to earth. “I don’t want to be angry all the time,” she finally said, her voice soft and strong and tired all at the same time, “but I don’t know how else to be.”

“I get it.” Helena raised her eyebrow at her, just slightly. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not just saying it,” Dinah sighed, the words coming out without her permission. “When I lost my mom, I spent so much time pissed off at the world. Part of me still is, I guess. It just always felt like if I wasn’t angry, then what happened to her was okay. Like, if I let go of my anger, then I’m letting go of the last thing I have of her.”

Helena was quiet again, and she knew she just had to wait for it, but she was impatient and emotional and desperate to fix what was almost certainly unfixable. “What happens when you do let go?” Helena asked.

Dinah shrugged, tried to keep herself grounded. Psychoanalyzing her traumatic past was not something she’d anticipated doing this morning. “If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Helena just nodded. Neither of them spoke for a while, until the quiet became too much, left too much room for her mind to wander. “How can you stand it?” She blurted out. Helena gave her a confused look, and she elaborated. “So much silence. You never seem phased by it.”

“Growing up, I was taught to meditate. I used to—“ she stopped herself, and Dinah was desperate to know the end of the sentence but knew she couldn’t rush it, had to wait and see how deep the well would go, how much Helena would give her if she showed she was willing to listen. “I didn’t stop hearing it for a while,” she finally said, and she didn’t lower her voice but something in the way she spoke felt different than before. “The shots. The echoes. The screams. But a killer who can’t live in silence will always get caught. So I had to learn. And now,” she shrugged. “Now I don’t mind it.”

Dinah almost didn’t ask, but she didn’t think she’d get another chance. “Do you still hear it?”

Helena sat very still, before nodding ever so slightly. 

“Yeah,” Dinah sighed, running a hand through her hair. “Me, too.”

“I know.” She must have made a face, because Helena hesitantly added, “I hear you when you wake up at night. I used to scream like that, too.”

“Used to?”

“Learning to stop was one of the first things they taught me.”

“And how did they manage to do that?”

Helena looked away, and she felt a pit in her stomach drop. “Ask me anything else,” she said, and Dinah knew it was both a deflection and an invitation, one she wouldn’t let pass on either account. 

“You never answered my first question,” she told her, and Helena glanced back up, and God, there was just something about the way she looked at her that made her brave and bold and desperate in a way she’d never felt before. 

“You’re the one who’s paying attention,” Helena responded. “How do I look at you?”

She wanted to tell her that her face was a language she didn’t quite understand yet, that every movement and shift was sending a message but when it came to her, she just couldn’t read them, or wouldn’t, because she didn’t know whether she saw what was real or what she wanted to see. “I don’t know,” she answered instead. “That’s why I asked.”

Helena was quiet again, but Dinah would wait ages to get an answer. She buried that realization deep into the back of her mind, let it sit there for her to contemplate later. Or never. Never worked, too. 

“When I look at you,” Helena started, and Dinah expected her to look away but instead she stared right at her, “I feel safe. And I haven’t felt safe in a long time.”

Dinah smiled. She didn’t realize how often she did that now. Ever since they started fighting together, ever since they started spending the time in between fights together, she hasn’t felt like she was waiting for the world to fall apart, like being happy wasn’t worth it because it was temporary. She wondered if that meant she was finally living. Not just surviving— living. 

She wanted to tell Helena it had been a long time since she’d felt that way, too, but she didn’t. She had a million things she wanted to tell her, things she’d never told anyone else before, and knowing just how badly she wanted it scared her in a way she couldn’t quite describe. When Helena looked at her, when she spoke, it was like a siren call, and Dinah felt every open every wound and sealed memory beckon to be released. More than anything, she wanted to let them go.

But not today. She knew that both of them had probably already passed their limit for emotional vulnerability for the day (or week), so she left it alone, let the words die on her tongue and silently vowed to give them life again soon. She had time, a realization that didn’t feel as daunting as it used to. The thought kept the smile on her face, even as she stood up. Grabbing both of their plates, she hummed a tune as she walked to the sink and hoped Helena heard her, hoped she knew that the song on her lips was for her and no one else, hoped she recognized it for what it was: a siren call of her own.

**Author's Note:**

> ok i struggled so much with finding Dinah's inner voice like her dialogue i felt okay with but the narration parts not so much so let me know how i did! 
> 
> also i have another fic that's more group-focused (but still dinah/helena) that's kinda closeish to being done but after that i don't have anything so if you have ideas or prompts let me know i would die if someone gave me a prompt!! how cool!
> 
> also find me on tumblr if u want @thanks--for--listening


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